Sir Kier Starmer resigned the way he assumed power in the first place. By revealing a relationship with truth so estranged it would make Josef Stalin blush.
“Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt,” Starmer told the country outside Downing Street.
It is necessary to deal with each of these claims in turn by virtue of the fact that unless challenged, recent history becomes ossified into a straitjacket of received wisdom that fatally conditions what can be thought possible in the future.
Politically Bankrupt
In 2019, Labour under Corbyn, as Starmer and his acolytes never tired of saying, achieved the party’s worst showing since 1935, winning just 202 seats. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won 365 seats, their best performance since Thatcher’s victory coronation of 1987.
Apart from memory-holing the election just two years before in which Labour had somehow secured the largest increase in its vote since 1945, this warped interpretation conveniently ignores how 2019 was uniquely about one issue, Brexit. And Corbyn’s Labour, faced with a core support overwhelming backing Remain and 2/3rds of the actual constituencies it was defending having voted Leave, was trying to pull off the most delicate of balancing acts.
Its 2017 result partly stemmed from a promise to respect the result of the referendum. But this stance was made all but impossible by then shadow Brexit spokesman – Sir Kier Starmer himself – deliberately violating the agreed party policy and telling the 2018 Labour conference that he wanted a second referendum “and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option”. This led to the perception that Labour was a part of a ‘Remain alliance’ and doomed it in the eyes of many voters in ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, and elsewhere.
Starmer also torpedoed cross-party negotiations with the May government in 2018 over getting a Brexit deal through the Commons, even ruling out his own party policy on a customs union. Thus, he ensured that the hardest of all Brexit deals would be the one to succeed.
But as soon as he became Labour leader in 2020, the ‘King of Remainia’ went through a strange metamorphosis and declared that “Britain’s future is outside the EU” and all arguments about the issue belonged to the past. Clearly his previous stance was very principled, though, and not all an amoral strategy to displace Corbyn at all costs.
Notwithstanding Starmer’s antics, the 2019 election would still have been closer had not Nigel Farage’s ‘Brexit Party’ (actually a company, not a political party) chosen not to stand in 317 Conservative-held seats. This had the result of artificially inflating the Conservative vote share and probably their number of seats.
Curiously, the Conservatives, who must have received – according to Starmer’s interpretation – such a resounding mandate in 2019 (in contrast to Corbyn’s Labour), have since shrunk to a rump of 121 seats. Why they have plunged into such an ‘existential crisis’ in such a short space of time is something of a mystery, unless of course the issue of Brexit artificially hid their real popularity just as it artificially magnified Labour’s divisions.
Financially bankrupt
This is especially ridiculous. Labour in 2019 were flush with cash, on the back of surging membership numbers which peaked at 600,000. Starmer’s unique talent was to reverse this process by telling hundreds of thousands of people to leave (“the door is open”), or simply expelling them.
He then partially plugged this gap by suddenly becoming immensely appealing to very rich people (many of whom formerly donated to the Tories) and corporations. For example, Labour’s 2024 election campaign was bankrolled by a huge £4 million donation from hedge fund Quadrature Capital, the largest single donation the party had ever received. But because of when it was received – in the week after Sunak called the election but before the “pre-poll reporting period” – Labour didn’t have to publicly declare it during the campaign. And our fearless media didn’t bother to enlighten anyone.
Morally Bankrupt
Now we come to the crux of Sir Kier’s appeal to posterity. He was a ‘decent’ man, fighting against the odds to rescue the party he loved from the cesspit of antisemitism into which it had fallen under Jeremy Corbyn.
The truth is rather different. Starmer, as the public face of the right-wing ‘Labour Together’ faction, cynically used antisemitism allegations to purge thousands of left-wingers from the party whose only crime was to criticise Israel, a country which would go on to refute these criticisms by committing a genocide in Gaza.
Of course, Sir Kier was on hand to support what was happening, lay on surveillance flights over Gaza, and increase arms sales at the height of the killing.
The Starmer purge extended to Corbyn, forced out of the party for observing, correctly – even mildly – that the extent of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated” by political opponents and the media.
Under Starmer the totalitarian mentality so gathered pace that even suggesting that Labour wasn’t riddled to the core with antisemites was an offence punishable with expulsion. Victims of this witch hunt included a Jewish professor, hauled up charges of simply repeating a pun by another Jewish member of the Labour party (Jo Bird’s ‘Jew process’) and an elderly Jewish woman accused of, among other things, “demonising Israel by inaccurately [sic] describing it as an apartheid state”.
There is a definite ‘pattern of behaviour’ here. In fact, as leader, Starmer expelled more Jews from the Labour party than all previous Labour leaders combined. As Andrew Feinstein (Starmer’s opponent in Holborn & St Pancras in 2024) pointed out, that is like expelling people of colour to combat racism.
In truth, the one decent thing that Sir Kier Starmer did was resign. Everything else was appalling.
Starmer’s handmaidens
But it would be wrong to see Starmer’s momentary ascendancy as being solely down to the man himself, once generously described as “a piece of hotel art made man”. Nor was his brief reign merely the responsibility of his sponsors in the shadowy Labour Together group, likened in their amorality to the denizens of Richard Nixon’s White House.
There had to be other powerful forces behind the strange phenomenon of Sir Kier Starmer and there were – the British media and important parts of the British state.
At every stage of his political career, the media had Starmer’s back, because, in essence, he had a job to – to destroy Corbynism at its roots. For example, every national media organisation (barring the Morning Star) enthusiastically backed Starmer’s decision to suspend Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour party for his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report.
The EHRC report was itself a sham, though. It deliberately refused to hear evidence contradicting its interpretation, erroneously described those guilty of ‘antisemitism’ as being ‘agents’ of the party, and accused the Corbyn leadership of acting unlawfully by riding roughshod over ‘established procedures’ to intervene in individual cases, when the party’s rule book explicitly allowed it to.
When the circumstances cried out for investigative journalism, all you got was consecration. And a herd of braying donkeys.
Conversely, when Starmer did subsequently furiously intervene in antisemitism cases to expel the (left-wing) perpetrators forthwith – something the EHRC (wrongly) said the Labour leadership was not allowed to do – there was complete media silence.
And when Starmer jerked Labour massively to the Right, after being elected as Labour leader by promising to continue with Corbyn’s policies, the media response was largely to commend him for practising clever politics.
Sometimes the cognitive dissonance was breathtaking. One of Starmer’s pledges to members when he was campaigning to be elected Labour leader was to “end the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime”. In reality when he got into government, not only did he fail to do this, he actually made it worse, increasing sanctions to their highest ever level in January 2026. According to an Amnesty spokesperson, “I’ve worked to highlight human rights violations for more than two decades and witnessed many awful situations. But never have I encountered such raw and widespread distress from people sharing their experiences in the UK.”
But, to the British media, this world, which affects millions of people, simply doesn’t exist.
And the media omertà about Starmer spread its tattered net far wider. The successful campaign by Starmer backers Labour Together to hamstring left-wing media organisations like The Canary after 2017 by getting advertisers to withdraw on the laughable basis of not supporting ‘fake news’ happened, at the time, completely in the shadows. Anti-Corbyn Labour bureaucrats’ scheme to funnel money to right-wing MPs in 2017 at the expense of the official campaign barely registered. And Starmer’s predilection for money and freebies from high-net-worth individuals and corporations to fill the financial void left by members deserting in droves was, almost without exception, left to the alternative media, who had a far smaller reach, to expose.
The 40-watt searchlights of the mainstream media continued their feeble glare after 2024. Starmer Labour’s 2025 deal with pharmaceutical corporations, which will double the amount the NHS pays for drugs, trampled all over the independence of NICE, the body that decides whether drugs are cost-effective and should be paid for by the NHS. But the deal was presented in entirely vanilla terms by the media, thus concealing what it was really about.
Our strange form of democracy – really oligarchy accompanied by ratification by universal suffrage – has left us in a paradoxical situation. Powerful and wealthy vested interests decide who can, and cannot, have political power (not Corbyn for example) but voters then cast their judgement on them. The result has been seven Prime Ministers in the last decade.
The fact that no-one of influence can see the problem is why they inflicted Sir Kier on us and expected it to work.
